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David Braben Kickstarts an Elite Reboot
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC report that David Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite, the classic space trading game that he co-wrote in the 1980s. It has already received £122,000 in less than a day."
Look, I know the guy did the original and kudos to him for it (I was a huge fan myself of the C64 version, back in the day). But with modern games like X3 and even EVE Online, the genre has come a LONG way since the early 80's. It's not going to be enough just to re-skin the original. A modern project like that is a HUGE undertaking. I just hope this guy understands that going in. I would hate to see a remake that couldn't even live up to the many successors it inspired.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Without Ian Bell either on the team nor getting credit, count me as disinterested.
> Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite
More of the masses funding elites, god damn it!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Here's a very interesting read (long but worth your time) about how the original was conceived: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/18/features.weekend
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
The problem with X3 and Eve are their learning curves. They're vertical cliffs.
What I would hope is that the new Elite game has is a reasonable learning curve so it introduces players in a reasonable manner that doesn't scare them off.
Ultimately Elite 2 was a massive improvement over Elite and Elite 3 was more a refinement of Elite 2. I'm holding back judgement because every Elite game thus far has been great.
He's not an idiot. Sounds like he was considering an MMO before WOW and EVE existed.
"I was very wary that we would be trailblazing and one of the ways we were planning to do it was to put a piece of hardware in every single phone exchange, so it was a much wider plan to achieve the very short ping times that you need to play the game we wanted to do. So we put that essentially on indefinite hold at that point because I knew it wasn't going to work well. And I'd rather not do it, than do something that didn't work well."
which is totally what she said
No comments on oolite yet?
http://www.oolite.org/
Its a popular genre... we could post different links to remakes for hours, probably.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The problem with X3 and Eve are their learning curves. They're vertical cliffs.
As was Elite.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The biggest misconception that people have about Eve Online is that it is a game. It is not a game; It is a second job.
Once you've made it above Frigate-class ships (Rifter FTW!), you need to spend an exponential amount of time learning skills and making money, and a lot of the skills for serious money-making (industrial skills like mining, research, and production) are not combat-based. Sure, you can make money as a pirate, or hire out your pilot skills as a mercenary or fleet escort, but it's dangerous work. The stress is, IMHO, equivalent to any full time job.
Personally, I like games to be fun. Eve is rewarding, but that's not the same.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm thinking it's generous to even label EVE Online as being a game. Needs reclassified as something like sci-fi online job simulator.
Fear is the mind killer.
A modern project like that is a HUGE undertaking.
But this is David Braben. He's the undisputed master of making huge things small. Original Elite put thousands of unique planets in 32K. Frontier put the entire galaxy on a floppy disk. The Raspberry Pi gave us a USB-stick sized general purpose computer for $35. If anyone can make something huge manageable, it's him.
Dear gaming world;
You cannot recapture your youth and the fun you had on ancient games simply by re-making an old classic for new technology.
It's never the same and it's always ends as a big disappointment. Why? Because gaming isn't the same as it was and neither are you.
Leave it as a happy memory, for pity sake, and move on.
Games are a lot cheaper if you don't hire Hollywood actors to record cut-scene dialogue that I just skip anyway.
Ask yourself why, with 20 years and a 235-strong development staff, he can't either fund this himself, or get a publisher to do so.
A developer of Braben's esteem could get publisher funding (as they have done for many other games), but he probably wants to retain creative freedom, which he can do with KS. When you have a publisher funding your project, they call the shots. If they want you to add more blood, explosions, zombies or whatever they think they'd like - it's their call and the studio must do what they're told. If they want it shipping 6 months before it's ready - it's their call. You want to add an innovative, but potentially risky feature? If the publisher isn't convinced, forget it! With KS, I'd say there's much more chance of Frontier shipping a quality game that pushes the boundaries, and won't be ruined by the type of dumbing down that dominates so much of the current crop of publisher-funded games.
Sent from my Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2).
Slightly off topic but interesting to Elite fans... Braben used the Fibonacci Sequence to create those "reproduciple sequence of numbers". (all the stars, locations, planet names, etc)
You stereotypers are all the same...